January 26, 2005

In Thomas Friedman's forthcoming book "The World is Flat" he asks, "In 2020, what will historians view as the definitive driver that shaped the world over the past twenty years, 9/11 or new phase of globalization?

At the Arab Strategy Forum last month that latter and proposed a simple framework for this new era of globalization:
- Business 1.0: 1492-1800 countries globalized
- Business 2.0: 1800-2000 companies globalized
- Business 3.0: 2000-2040 individuals globalized

To compete in business 3.0, he suggested that government policies must engender the following policies to enable their citizens to succeed:
1. Make it possible to quickly start a business (2 years in Egypt in 2004)
2. Make it easy to hire and fire (accelerate idea birth and death)
3. Enforce contracts (without bribes)
4. Ease of credit (make it easy to go bankrupt)

Summing up his thoughts, he reiterated that the era of lifetime employment is gone and that individuals will migrate to geographies that support lifetime employability. Moreover, the development of human capital would require more flexibility in terms of their use of emerging tools to compete in this radically competitive economic environment. While not stating it outright, I would assert that this would include enabling neurotechnologies such as cogniceuticals to improve memory retention and neurofeedback systems to accelerate one's understanding of their emotional propensities. Neurotechology is already driving competitive advantage among individuals in the Business 3.0 political-economic ecology.

January 16, 2004

Update 8/8/04: I'm adding this link to the real definition of neuroecology for all of those who come to this site via search engines looking for information on neuroecology.

New Year's Eve day I was walking through UCLA's sculpture garden when I ran into my first college professor, Hartmut Walter, Professor of Biogeography. Harmut has spent over 30 years trying to answer questions like:

-- How do species persist?
-- How do they avoid extinction?
-- At what point will a species distribution area hasten extinction processes?
-- How can biogeography aid endangered species conservation?

Conserving biological diversity has always been at the heart of his research, as well as a deep interest of mine. During our discussion, Harmut shared his latest realization with me, namely that unless we include human perceptions of the natural ecology into the conservation equations, we will inevitably fail to halt species extinction. Like a true geographer, Harmut is now focused on bringing place back into biogeography.

At its core, geography is the study of place. So while economists study economic theories, economic geographers, like my graduate advisor Allen Scott, analyze economic history to understand the complexity of factors that allow certain economic regions to thrive and others to wilt.

A newly emerging discipline within geography is psychogeography. Psychogeography is concerned with the human perception of place and how it changes over time. In a way, what Hartmut is trying to do is meld psychogeography with biogeography, creating in effect, psycho-biogeography.

As I sat through the neuroesthetics conference last weekend, I was thinking of my conversation with Harmut and realized that there was a further step that needs to be taken in order to bring humans into the conservation solution.

Whereas neuroesthetics uses the latest brain imaging and genetic analysis techniques to understand the neural basis of artistic creativity and achievement, the same techniques could be used to get a more scientific understanding of our perception of nature. And that's when I thought of the term, neuroecology.

Neuroecology uses neurotechnology to understand the neural basis of our perception and appreciation of the natural world.

As I thanked him that day for the rigorous introductory course in biogeography that he put me through, I was grateful for having crossed paths with him when I did. Biogeography solidified my basic understanding of ecological principles.

Several years ago, I spent some time in Costa Rica trying to find evidence that would support this hypothesis. I was searching of something extra/different in the ecology that might explain the exceptional diversity found in one of the most species rich areas on Earth.

Lianas are the longest living plant in the rainforest. They outlive all rainforest trees several times over and can grow thousands of feet long. Their longevity and length means that lianas are often found linking the canopies of several large trees.

The additional connectedness that lianas bring to the rainforest means that when one tree falls, multiple trees follow, creating medium size gaps that average about 50 meters in diameter throughout the forest. At any one time about 10% of the forest is in this new gap state.

These medium size gaps are unique to rainforests that have lianas. These gaps create open islands with new edges and niches for species to invade and inhabit. In this small, but important way, lianas contribute to maximizing species diversity in tropical rainforests.